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Monday, December 24, 2012

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: In the wee hours of Saturday,
the two Italian naval guards charged with shooting dead two Indian
fishermen flew out of Kochi airport in a chartered flight from Italy. The question most often asked here now is: Will they return, as promised, by Jan 10, 2013?

The two Italians were charged with killing fishermen Ajesh Binki and Gelastine on February 15, allegedly taking them for pirates.

The naval guards were out on bail, staying in a Kochi hotel.

On Thursday, the Kerala high court ruled that subject to some conditions, the two naval guards could be allowed to returnhome for Christmas.

The families of the slain fishermen doubt the Italians will now return to stand trial in India. The Left opposition in the state too has expressed doubt the two will return.

The
Italian consul general, however, has asserted that the men will return.
An assurance to this effect was sought by the court from the Italian
government before allowing the men the trip home for Christmas.

Chief minister Oommen Chandy
told reporters that his government had opposed relaxation in the bail
conditions of the two accused; he told reporters on Saturday that it was
now up to the central government to see that the two return.

"There
need be no doubt on the state government's stance. When the request for
a Christmas holiday for the two first came, we strongly opposed it. Now
it's the responsibility of the central government to see that the two
return. The Italian government has offered such an assurance," the chief
minister said.

Meanwhile, reports from Italy indicate that the two could expect the welcome of heroes, later Saturday.

To circumvent the law, the two could be fielded as candidates in upcoming general elections in Italy.

Italian
officials in Delhi expect that the case in the Supreme Court of India,
in which the Italian government has demanded trial under international
law, could be ruled in their favour.

Meanwhile, the CPM is all set to close in on an opportunity to go hammer and tongs at the state government, in case the two accused fail to return.
There are already murmurings that none other than Congress president
Sonia Gandhi had intervened, in favour of the two marines from the
country of her origin.

Trivandrum Latin Church Archbishop M Susaipakiam told reporters here on Saturday that allowing the two Italian naval guards to return was a good gesture.

"This gesture is certain to increase warmth in the relations between the two countries," the archbishop said.

For Mohammed Ziad Awad Salayma, age 17, killed on his birthday
(12-12-12) because, being hard of hearing, he did not understand Israeli
soldier Nofar Mizrahi, who shot him at point blank range.There
is something hapless about Guy Delisle’s character in his comics. He is
the husband of an Médecins Sans Frontières worker, Nadege, whose
postings to Myanmar and Israel-Palestine provided the opportunity for
their family (including children Louis and Alice) to see the world.
Delisle had itchy feet before these spousal appointments. He had been to
both China and North Korea as part of his work as a supervisor of
animation work. These resulted in his quirky, but informative comic
books, Shenzhen (2000) and
Pyongyang (2003). When I first read these, I was put to mind of the work
of Joe Sacco, whose Safe Area Gorazde: The War in Eastern Bosnia,
1992-1995 (2000) and Palestine (2001) is the gold standard in political
comic journalism. Delisle’s work is no less serious than Sacco’s, but
there is a major difference. Both put themselves into the frame, but
Sacco is there to break the idea of objectivity
and to offer his critical voice as antidote to the saccharine way in
which conflict is too often recorded (this is consciously laid-out in
his new book Journalism, Metropolitan Books, 2012). Delisle is also in
his books, but he is the clueless observer who bumps into things, is
silly with those whom he encounters and through the fabric of everyday
interactions is able to reveal something about places that are so rarely
understood by those who do not make the studied attempt.The
“Delisle” in the books finds his voice when he becomes a father, as he
goes with Nadege to her posting in Myanmar with young Louis and then to
Israel-Palestine with Louis and Alice. In both books that resulted from
these tours (Burma Chronicles, 2008; Jerusalem, 2012), Delisle is seen
pushing a stroller, wondering about daycare and parks, trying to find a
way to entertain himself between the delightful tedium of parenting full
time and the exciting cultural worlds that surround him. His Myanmar
book is filled with small details of the privileges of the paranoid
kleptocracy that rules the country and the privations of ordinary
people, interspersed with the stories of the simple joy of living. But
then, out of nowhere, the politics breaks through. Delisle is taken to
the northern town of Hpakant, in Kachin State, where he finds that
workers in the Chinese-owned jade mines receive their wages, he is told,
in heroin. For a small price, the workers visit the “shooting
galleries,” which the government allows since drugs are a good pacifier
for a region that is otherwise home to a major insurgency. The naïve dad
becomes the documentarian of callous suffering.If I were the
Israeli government, I’d have done some research on Delisle before
letting him into the country. With his family, Delisle moves to
Jerusalem for 2008-09. While Nadege is at work at MSF in the Palestinian
territories, Delisle uncovers the everyday inequities of Israel. The
family live in East Jerusalem, part of the occupied territories,which
are held in developmental stasis – they find a population devastated by
the “separation wall” and by the constant presence of the Israeli
forces. Meanwhile, across the various green lines, Israel is, as the
Israelis like to say, a little bit like Europe. The stark divides are
revealed through the light touch of the inconveniences of life for a
parent trying to raise his two children. And of course Delisle is well
aware that his is only a temporary condition, and that he has the
advantages of the NGO foreigner. Parts of this book reminded me of
Nicolas Wild’s Kabul Disco (HarperCollins, 2009), a vision of a war-torn
city from the standpoint of an NGO worker who is trying to navigate
everyday life.But then Israel begins Operation Cast Lead. Nadege is
called to Gaza, but her MSF colleagues cannot get in. Israel has closed
the Strip. It is through their experiences and the Al-Jazeera journalist
Ayman Mohyeldin’s reports that we hear of Gaza. It is the outpost – the
no-man’s land. But the war on Gaza punctuates the book. It is the
ellipse. The rest of the book goes back to documenting the suffocation of the Palestinians
by the Israeli state, the emergence of a dogmatic nationalism in
Israeli society and the conundrums of the expatriate who feels deeply
for the victims but can do little for them. At a party of expats toward
the book’s end, Delisle is asked about art projects in the Palestinian
territories. “Getting into North Korea was easier,” he says. He would
know.Inside Gaza, during Cast Lead, there was no room for ambiguity.
Fida Qishta, born and raised in Rafah, took to the video camera and
held fast to it to document her world. Snippets of her professional work
as a marriage videographer show us how people living under such a long
occupation remember to find joy. But near them in this painful
meditation of a film, Where Should the Birds Fly,
the humiliation of survival creeps in. Scenes of ordinary farmers and
fisherfolk trying to do their trade while Israeli snipers and gunboats
shoot at them get straight to the point. All those who talk of Hamas
rockets being fired into Israel should take a look at this section of
Qishta’s film, where there is a banal, even tendentious use of the gun
to degrade and frighten unarmed Palestinians as they try to make a
living. Bulldozers and border crossings make it impossible to lead
lives.Then comes Cast Lead. It is a good thing that Qishta has her
camera and that she is so brave. The scenes are disturbing and honest –
there is nothing manufactured about her film. We are there on the day
(January 18) an Israeli attack killed forty-eight members of the family
of Helmi and Maha Samouni – whose house in Zeituon, in the suburbs of
Gaza City, was bombed and then occupied. The departing Israeli soldiers
left behind love notes to Palestine, graffiti in Hebrew and English:
Arabs need 2 die, Make War Not Peace, 1 is down, 999,999 to go, Arabs
1948-2009. Qishta went to see fifteen-year old Ayman el-Najar in Naser
Hospital in Khan Younis, victim of an Israeli bomb (which killed his
sister). He shows Qishta his wounds, his body wracked by white
phosphorus burns (the graphic image seers). Qishta takes refuge at a UN
compound, shelter to fleeing Palestinian families. Israeli F-16s release
their bombs, some land on the UN buildings, the night resplendent with the white phosphorus traces, beautiful in the sky, barbaric on the skin.Then
we meet Mona. She is the highlight of this disturbingly accurate film.
At age ten, she is Qishta’s guide into the suffering and resilience of
Gaza. Her farming family were herded into a neighbors’ home by Israeli
troops who accuse her brother of being with Hamas; the home is then
bombed from the sky. Qishta asks Mona how many people in her family died
that day. “In my immediate family?” ask Mona, innocent to the gravity
of the answer. So much death, but she appears resigned and wise. “If we
die,” she says gravely, “we die. If we survive, we survive.” She shows
Qishta a drawing she did of the massacre. “It was a sea of blood and
body parts,” she says. “They took the most precious beloved of my
heart,” meaning her parents. She points to a person in her drawing,
“This is Palestine. I drew her bleeding.”There is a scene by the
beach. Mona is telling Qishta about her feelings. It sounds to my ear
like a child’s version of the kind of grand horizon of Mahmoud Darwish:I really love the birds because they have freedom,They fly, they sing, and they travel.In the morning, they chirp.Here in Gaza we are like caged birds.We can’t fly, breathe or sing.We are locked in a cage of sadness and sorrows.I
wonder if Delisle would have been able to maintain his detachment if he
had met Mona. I wondered this as I thought about how I had watched
Qishta’s film. Did I watch it, and then turn away, feeling the
overwhelming futility, escaping into something mundane? Can I bear the
weight of what young Mona carries, the devastation of her loss?Vijay Prashad’s most recent book is Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press).

The view that it will deter rape is misplaced and based on a narrow, sexual intercourse-definition of the crime

There is a fascinating urban legend that Apple’s logo is dedicated to
Alan Turing, who committed suicide by biting into a cyanide injected
apple. A few years after he was instrumental in breaking the German
Enigma code in World War II, Alan Turing was convicted in 1952 for
homosexual acts in England. He agreed to the administration of female
hormones when faced with incarceration. Apart from the abhorrent aim of
such a measure, the scientific claim that hormone injections could alter
sexuality proved to be dubious. The intuitive appeal chemical
castration has as a method of drastically reducing the incidence of
rape, I argue, is largely misplaced because it misunderstands the nature
of rape as a crime. Rape is not about sex. Rape is about power,
violence, intimidation and humiliation. Attempts to reduce the incidence
of rape by controlling the sexual urge of men are bound to be
ineffective because they invoke a very shallow and inadequate
understanding of rape.

‘More effective’ punishment

Much before the current demand for chemical castration as a legal
response to rape, Additional Sessions Judge Kamini Lau, while sentencing
Dinesh Yadav in May 2011 for raping his 15-year old step-daughter for
four years, called for a debate on castration as an alternative to
incarceration in rape cases. Sentencing Dinesh Yadav to the minimum
possible punishment of 10 years for such a crime under Section 375(2) of
the Indian Penal Code, Judge Lau indicated that castration, surgical or
chemical, would perhaps be a far more effective method to prevent rape.
While contemplating the legal and ethical aspects of such a measure, it
is important that we understand the precise terms of the suggestion,
its potential to reduce the incidence of rape and its potential for
abuse.

Clarity on the meaning of some of the terms might be useful at this
juncture. Surgical castration does not mean removal of the penis, but is
instead the irreversible surgical removal of the testosterone producing
testes. Chemical castration involves injecting anti-androgen drugs that
suppress the production of testosterone as long as the drugs are
administered.

Modern legal systems have flirted with biological control of sexual
functions for a long time for a variety of reasons. Forced sterilisation
of criminals and intellectually disabled people through legislation to
protect the purity of the gene pool was seen as an acceptable response
to the eugenics movement in Europe and the United States in the early
1900s. The United States Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927),
upheld the constitutionality of the 1924 Virginia statute that
authorised the forced sterilisation of intellectually disabled people
(‘mentally retarded’ was the term in the statute). Vehemently endorsing
the eugenic aims of the statute, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
permitted the forcible sterilisation of an 18-year old woman, with an
alleged mental age of nine years and a family history of intellectual
disability, with the infamous words that ‘three generations of imbeciles
were enough’. Though Buck v. Bell has never been explicitly over-ruled, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Skinner v. Oklahoma
(1942) and the events in Nazi Germany considerably dented the
popularity of forced sterilisations as part of the eugenics agenda.
Forced sterilisations in the best interest of the intellectually
disabled continued in the United States till the early 1980s and it was
in the mid-1990s that the debates around chemical castration as a
response to rape surfaced as a result of legislation in certain American
States.

Once we get past the historical baggage of the term ‘castration,’ the
strongest argument in favour of chemical castration is that it is a
non-invasive, reversible method of nullifying the production of
testosterone and thereby controlling extreme sexual urge. The use of
Depo-Provera in many American States subsequent to chemical castration
legislation does indicate that it reduces the risk of recidivism.
However, such an approach limits the understanding of rape to the
framework of sex. Irrespective of the differences in their positions on
rape, influential feminists like Susan Brownmiller, Catharine MacKinnon,
Andrea Dworkin, Ann Cahill, etc., agree that rape is not about the
manifestation of extreme sexual urge. Violence, power, aggression and
humiliation are central to understanding rape, and sex is only a
mechanism used to achieve those aims.

Addressing the sexual element of rape does not address the violence and
humiliation that rape is intended to inflict. Responding to a question
on whether chemical castration for child molesters works, Catharine
MacKinnon in an interview with Diane Rosenfeld (March 2000) captured the
issue at hand by saying that “they just use bottles”. Castration as a
response to rape furthers the myth that rape is about the uncontrollable
sexual urge of men.

The limited role that sex has to play in understanding rape is further
borne out by the fact that not all sex offenders are the same. In
essence, an understanding that requires us to look at rapists merely as
individuals engaging in deviant sexual behaviour is inaccurate. Rapists
fall into different categories including those who deny the commission
of the crime or the criminal nature of the act; blame the crime on
factors like stress, alcohol, drugs or other non-sexual factors; rape
for reasons related to anger, shaming, violence, etc; rape for reasons
connected to sexual arousal and specific sexual fantasies, etc.
Administering anti-androgens to rapists outside the last category will
not be an effective response to check the incidence of rape. Mapping the
long standing demand in India to reform the definition of rape (beyond
penile-vaginal penetration) to include object/finger-vaginal/anal
penetration on to the different categories of sexual offenders shows
that a sexual intercourse-based understanding of rape is extremely
narrow.

Gender violence

Even the most ardent supporters of chemical castration recognise that
administration of anti-androgens without relevant therapies defeats the
point of the entire exercise. Given the significant side-effects of
chemical castration, a law that would require indefinite administration
of anti-androgens for sex offenders is likely to be unconstitutional.
Even if the argument is that governments must invest in chemical
castration even if it means a minuscule effect on the incidence of rape,
it would require State governments to put in place a rigorous system of
providing therapy for it to be a constitutional option. Given the
condition of state health care services in India, there are very good
reasons to be sceptical about the feasibility of providing such therapy.

It is difficult not to succumb to the intuitive appeal of chemical
castration as a response to rape. But it is an intuitive appeal that
fades away on intense scrutiny. Intuition can be a great asset in
politics of all sorts, but it is best avoided while contemplating a law
requiring huge public investment, whose potential for abuse is immense
and the benefits of which are, at best, uncertain.

Any meaningful attempt to protect women against rape must engage with
gendered notions of power entrenched in our families, our marriages, our
workplaces, our educational institutions, our religions, our laws, our
political parties and, perhaps, worst of all, in our minds. There are
many violent manifestations of these entrenched patterns of power in our
society and while rape is certainly one of them, it would be a great
disservice to empowerment of women in this country to not attach the
same kind of urgency and significance to gender violence beyond rape.

(Anup Surendranath is an Assistant Professor of Law, National Law
University, Delhi, and doctoral candidate at the Faculty of Law,
University of Oxford.)

Some 57 Members of Legislative Assembly elected by
Gujarat in the December polls face criminal charges, including that of
rape and murder, while nearly three-fourth of them are crorepatis, up
from 31 per cent in the 2007 elections, according to data analysed by
the Gujarat Election Watch.

The data shows that one-third of MLAs belonging to the Congress as well as the BJP have declared criminal cases.

The
top three richest MLAs are from the Congress with Balvantsinh Rajput
from Sidhpur constituency having assets worth Rs. 268 crore, followed by
Rajguru Indranil from Rajkot East with Rs. 122 crore and Pethalji
Chavda from Manavadar constituency with assets worth Rs. 82.90 crore.

Of
the 57 MLAs facing cases, charges have been framed against 35 MLAs for
various crimes and 24 face serious offences. In 2007, 47 MLAs had
criminal charges against them.

BJP MLA from Shehra
constituency in Panchmahals district Jetha Bharwad, who had allegedly
opened fire and injured four people at Tarsang village during polling on
December 17 and was detained by the police, has a charge of kidnapping
and inducing a woman to compel her for marriage, and two others of rape
and extortion. Bharward, a former suspended police constable, faces a
case of forgery. The MLA has not been convicted so far.

Janata
Dal (United) strongman from tribal constituency of Jhagadia in South
Gujarat’s Bharuch district Chhotu Vasava has 28 cases against him,
including nine of dacoity, seven theft and three murder. Charges have
been framed in 28 cases.

BJP veteran from North Gujarat Shankar Chaudhary has three murder cases. He won from Vav constituency.

A
Modi confidant and former MoS (Home) Amit Shah faces two charges of
kidnapping and wrongful confinement, two of murder, and one of
kidnapping to murder, among others.